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Razgorov Prikazka writes "A Dutch-based company from Groningen is trying to create a potato race that is able to survive in a saline environment. The first test-batch was just harvested (English translation of Dutch original) on the island Texel and seem to be in good shape. The company states that rising sea-levels will create a demand for halophile crops. I do wonder if one still has to put salt on ones potatoes when they are grown in salt water."

In news just to hand, the new race has formed a political party of Sebago Supremacists demanding new rights based on their need for 'kartoffelns-raum'. The group spokesman, Herr Kartoffelnkopf, gave a statement denying rumours of armament against field borders.

Me,I figured "halophile potatoes" were like couch potatoes that only played Halo instead of the more traditional channel surfing. I was excited by the harvesting, thinking we'd increase the average IQ by it, but alas it was not to be.

From the title, I thought they'd made potatoes that love to molest Halo players.

Funny. When I read "create a potato race" I thought of those races at picnics where everyone runs with an egg on a teaspoon and whoever can deposit the unboken egg in a bowl across the finish line first wins.

Oddly enough, there *is* a MasterChef [wikipedia.org] TV show here in the UK- and the original version was around *long* before Halo came out. That's why I can't hear the Halo character's name without thinking of Loyd Grossman cogitating over some random plebs' cookery- probably not what was intended.:-)

I'm guessing that they managed to coax the potatoes into maintaining their normal osmotic balance when watered with brackish water. For one thing a crop that absorbed the salt would be hard to get consistent.

As long as you can get a solution going with the water you are using on the potatoes it will likely precipitate out of the soil and enter the groundwater. From there, eventually it will get to the sea.

Wouldn't this lead to a build-up of salt in the soil itself? At some point, that's bound to cause problems... They don't call it "salting the earth" for nothing.

We already have regular potatoes that grow just fine with fresh water. These new halophile potatoes won't be grown on regular farmland.

There are large areas of coast and riverbank that have no easy access to fresh water, but plenty of salt or brackish water. There are also an increasing number of agricultural areas who use reclaimed wastewater (greywater) to irrigate their fields. Finally, sea levels are expected to rise due to Manbearpig, and this will increase the amount of floodplain affected by brackish water.

This new strain of potato is going to be grown in areas with brackish water, on or near estuaries, and probably to a lesser extent areas irrigated with lightly-treated greywater. Depending on how much salt they can tolerate, you might eventually see them being grown underneath coconut.

Couldn't this also be used for hydroponically grown produce? It would be incredibly useful for those that are required to spend long periods of time in high salinity areas. For example, navy ships, Oil rigs, Exploration ships and island dwelling nations?

Nobody* is growing potatoes hydroponically, at least not with inert media. It can be done [amazon.com] but potatoes are one of those stupid easy crops to grow... if you do it on soil. Basically all you need to do is plow your field once a year and otherwise leave it the hell alone, weeds and all. Weeds mulch. Potatoes grow. Actually you can grow them in hay bales, which is about as close as you get to hydroponics in common practice. Then you just tear the bales apart to get out the potatoes, compost the old bales, and s

[...] potatoes are one of those stupid easy crops to grow... if you do it on soil. Basically all you need to do is plow your field once a year and otherwise leave it the hell alone, weeds and all. Weeds mulch. Potatoes grow.

The phrase "Irish Potatoe Famine" comes to mind.
Without fungicides, you can still get a disappointingly small harvest.
Commercial growers use a *lot* of fungicides, and since they are illegal here in.se for
non-professionals, the rest of us can only keep our fingers crossed and hope f

Without fungicides, you can still get a disappointingly small harvest.

You mean, with monocultures, you can still get a disappointingly small harvest. Nature never produces monocultures, even when it looks like it has there is always some companion, not to mention what is going on unseen underground. We must learn to more carefully emulate nature. Right now we're killing everything in between croplands to try to prevent "contamination" by animals passing through fields etc. This will not end well.

Depending upon how this product tastes it might be used as animal feed or even fish food it made into pellets. After all a good catfish farm still needs top feed those catfish. And I eagerly await a process for farming blue crabs in indoor ponds. I know that one of th great costs in salt water systems involves the power bill for running high quality filtration systems. It would seem to me that since mussels, oysters and

No, those of us with any culinary training don't. It's totally unnecessary.

Wow, you really are a McToolbag, aren't you? My lady is a four-star chef and sometimes she puts salt on fish and sometimes not. If I'm cooking a salmon fillet on a cedar plank I won't add salt; last time it was butter and maple sugar. But I assure you that the whole snapper I was served in Panama had salt in the super-thin breading they crisped it up with. (My pick for best restaurant in the country of Panama is La Esquina Van Gogh in Panama City... and I ate at several of the nation's finest restaurants; y

And what do you think they eat? Hm? Smaller life that lives in the water. Which usually is animals which do the same. Or plants which live in the salty water. Also since fish also need water to “drink”, they absorb it too.

Your statement it so short-sighted, that even its own nose looks blurry to it.;)

Of course not. I like talapia with a little butter (unsalted), pepper, and lime juice, or a bit of black bean salsa if I have some around. Grilled salmon needs no salt. My fresh-caught walleye and yellow perch get dipped in egg wash and bread crumbs, then fried, no salt added. Bad analogy, since lots of fish can be fine without salt but the potatoes in question will likely still need salt to please most people, as more common varieties of spuds do.

EENRUM - The first potatoes, which a company called Biemond (based in Eenrum), fed with salt water, were lifted on a test field on the island of Texel on friday.

Biemond is breeding new races of potatoes, and together with Fobek in the Frisian town of Sint Annaparochie, wants to develop potatoes that are resistant to salt water.

Due to rising sea levels companies expect farmers to increasingly have to deal with salt water on their fields.

The biggest mistakes Google Translate made were due to use of the word "piepers" for "potatoes". It was incorrectly translated as squeaker and pager - at least I think it's incorrectly. I've never heard anyone use those words when talking about potatoes.

I suspect that "salt water on their fields" in the sense of "field is actually under the sea" is going to be a relatively rare issue, except in places that are coastal already and extremely flat.

The big, ugly, much more widespread problem, though, is going to be aquifer infiltration. Groundwater is, well, underground, so your groundwater can easily be below sea level even if you are substantially above sea level(and, even if you are pumping from, say, 100 ft underground, you are getting water from a variety of levels, depending on the exact nature of the geological strata down there. Unless there is an impermiable layer just below your well depth, you'll have some amount of diffusion from below.).

Since virtually everyone is overpumping their aquifers anyway(though it is considered impolite to talk about it), even if sea levels stay exactly as they are it is expected that more groundwater is going to face seawater or deep saltwater(salt is a mineral, after all, and occurs in some geological strata quite naturally. If exposed to groundwater, it will form delicious brine just fine) infiltration. If the water you are using for irrigation is even slightly brackish, the salt levels in your fields will increase over time. Salt in the water gets sprayed on, water evaporates, salt doesn't, soil contains more salt. Repeat next season...

The "zOMG global warming, seas devouring the lands" angle is an easy way to give the story a topical flavor(plus, these guys are dutch, being underwater isn't a theoretical problem for them); but the need for agriculturally useful halophiles would exist even if sea levels don't budge at all, due to overuse and misuse of groundwater reserves.

Holland really does have appreciable farmland below sea level. They built dikes around their marshes centuries ago, pumped them out with windmills, pumped out their fresh water aquifers, and as the land dries up it shrinks and settles. Today it can be tens of feet below sea level. California is also experiencing this in the Sacramento River delta, and no doubt it is common elsewhere.

***The company states that rising sea-levels will create a demand for halophile crops.***

I hope they are better at plant breeding than at marketing. Unless they are planning to grow the potatoes under water, there isn't going to be any more market for salt tolerant potatoes than there is now, no matter how high the seas rise. Now if the seas dropped... the exposed land might need salt tolerant crops for many decades.

But yes, there will be a market for these in water deficient areas like the Middle East a

I hope they are better at plant breeding than at marketing. Unless they are planning to grow the potatoes under water, there isn't going to be any more market for salt tolerant potatoes than there is now, no matter how high the seas rise.

True, I don't think sea levels are the problem. Seems like the real issue will be keeping up with demand for fresh water when higher temperatures melt the snow pack earlier each year and the world population continues growing. So, if you don't have to do much (any?) processing to sea water, there'd be much less strain on water resources with halophile crops.

Don't worry about it, Idaho russets suck. They only really good potatoes are the yellow ones. The red ones are ok mashed. White potatoes could be used to make fries, assuming one cannot get yellow potatoes. and assuming ones has enough seasoning to cover it up.

Hmm. Never heard of Idaho potatoes before I read your comment. I'd wager the rest of the world that exists outside the US borders hasn't heard either.

Seconded- here in the UK, the only location really associated with potatoes is the island of Jersey [wikipedia.org]. Only reason I've ever heard of Idaho's alleged fame for its potatoes at all is because I saw it mentioned in a Wikipedia article a few months back. I doubt many other people here know of it.

Bacon, butter, sour cream, cheese... Why not go all the way, just leave out the potatoes, and pour pure fat into your throat?;)

Reminds me of that German radio comedy of a fat German soccer coach: Remove the roof of your garage, and fill it to the top with frying oil and lard. Add 10 sacks of cereals, half a truck of pork rinds and a wheelbarrow of herbs to top it off. Let it harden, break away the walls, and your Spring Sports Energy Bar is ready! Mmmmmmhhhh....

Bacon, butter, sour cream, cheese... Why not go all the way, just leave out the potatoes, and pour pure fat into your throat?;)

I guess you're either trolling, or ignorant. Feel free to check out the blog of M.D. Michael R. Eades at http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/ [proteinpower.com] as well as his books, and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (and a heap of other great books, none of which I can recall at the moment).

Natural fats aren't bad for your health. No, not even saturated fat. Do yourself and those close to you the most important favor you'll ever do and read some science on nutrition instead of gobbeling up the official nutritio

It's not clear how high a salt concentration these potatoes tolerate. Probably lower than sea water. The article indicates that they're trying to make potatoes tolerant of salt water incursions into ground water. In areas with low-lying coastlines, groundwater becomes increasingly salty nearer to the ocean. This makes near-coastal land more useful.

A few crops, like "salt hay", will grow in seawater, even on tidal flats. Historically, though, the crops that will grow in those conditions are of marginal value.

A lot of the water in aquifers in otherwise bone-dry climates is brackish. This means that much of the west can be opened for farming potatoes in the future. Of course, it won't last long, as the salt concentrations will rise and after about 50 years, the land will no longer be able to support crops. This happened in many of the Mesopotamian civilizations, and is thought to be a key factor in the decline of many of those civilizations.

This is the start of something amazing, we have potatoes, we genetically change them to be xxx....what if we could have potatoes that have more vitamins and minerals then before, have so much more that you don't need so many OTHER vegetables...some anti oxydents etc...you could create a new vegetable that replaces all other crops especially for farming in third world countries....it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how, and then watch us grow...literally! We will all be much less vitamin